laughing? Maybe everything would be okay.
Just call me Pollyanna Huckleberry Holly Go lightly Snow.
The elevator reached B-2, one floor above us.
I raised the shotgun, in case passengers were in the elevator, as there
evidently had been before.
Already, the pulsing hum of the egg room engines or whatever infernal
machines made the noise grew louder.
“Better hurry, ” Doogie said, because if the wrong moment of the past
flowed into the present again, it might wash some angry, armed men with
It.
The elevator whined to a stop at B-3, our floor. The corridor around me
grew steadily brighter. As the elevator doors began to slide open, I
expected to see the murky red light in the cab, and then I was suddenly
afraid I’d be confronted with that impossible vista of stars and cold
black space I’d seen beyond the stairwell door. The elevator cab was
just an elevator cab. Empty. “Move! ” Doogie urged.
Roosevelt and Sasha already had Bobby on his feet, virtually carrying
him between them, while trying to minimize the strain on his left
shoulder.
I held the elevator door, and as they took Bobby past me, his face
twisted with agony. If he had been about to scream with pain, he
repressed it and instead said, “Carpe cerevisi.”
“Beer later, ” I promised.
“Beer now, party boy, ” he wheezed.
Slipping off his backpack, Doogie followed us into the big elevator,
which could probably carry fifteen passengers. The cab briefly swayed
and jiggled as it adjusted to his weight, and we all tried not to step
on Mungojerrie.
“Up and out, ” I said.
“Down, ” Bobby disagreed.
The control panel had no buttons for the three floors that were
supposedly below us. An unlabeled slot for a magnetic card indicated how
someone with the proper security clearance could reprogram the existing
control buttons to gain access to lower realms. We didn’t have a card.
“There’s no way to get farther down, ” I said.
“Always a way, ” Doogie demurred, rummaging in his backpack.
The corridor was bright. The loud throbbing sound grew louder.
The elevator doors rolled shut, but we didn’t go anywhere, and when I
reached toward the G button, Doogie slapped my hand as though I were a
child reaching for a cookie without having asked permission.
“This is nuts, ” I said.
“Radically, ” Bobby agreed.
He sagged against the back wall of the cab, supported by Sasha and
Roosevelt. He was gray now.
I said, “Bro, you don’t have to be a hero.”
“Yeah, I do.”
“No, you don’t! ”
“Kahuna.”
“What? ”
“If I’m Kahuna, I can’t be a chickenshit.”
“You aren’t Kahuna.”
“King of the surf, ” he said.
When he coughed this time, blood bubbled on his lips.
Desperate, I said to Sasha, “We’re getting him up and out of here, right
now.” A crack and then a creak sounded behind me. Doogie had picked the
lock on the control panel and had swung the cover aside, exposing the
wiring.
“What floor? ” he asked.
“Mungojerrie says all the way down, ” Roosevelt advised.
I protested, “Orson, the kids we don’t even know if they’re alive!”
“They’re alive, ” Roosevelt said.
“We don’t know.”
“We know.” I turned to Sasha for support. “Are you as crazy as the rest
of them? ” She said nothing, but the pity in her eyes was so terrible
that I had to look away from her. She knew that Bobby and I were as
tight as friends can get, that we were brothers in all but blood, as
close as identical twins. She knew that a part of me was going to die
when Bobby died, leaving an emptiness even she would never fill. She saw
my vulnerability, she would have done anything, anything, anything, if
she could have saved Bobby, but she could do nothing. In her
helplessness, I saw my own helplessness, which I couldn’t bear to
contemplate.
I lowered my gaze to the cat. For an instant I wanted to stomp
Mungojerrie, crush the life out of him, as if he were responsible for
our being here. I had asked Sasha if she was as crazy as the rest of